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[PAST EVENT] Cutler Lecture: Daryl Levinson, NYU Law School
September 4, 2013
3:30pm - 5pm
Daryl Levinson is the David Boies Professor of Law at NYU. He has also held faculty appointments at Virginia and, more recently, Harvard, where he was the Fessenden Professor of Law and a faculty fellow of the Harvard Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics. His primary field of teaching and research is constitutional law, but Levinson's scholarship has ranged more broadly, addressing topics such as group punishment and empire-building government. Levinson has received the Sacks-Freund teaching award at Harvard and the Podell Distinguished Teaching Award at NYU. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Professor Levinson's lecture is titled "Incapacitating the State."
Description:
The modern state is an extremely powerful technology, one that can be used for good but also for evil. States can provide order and security, markets and prosperity, education and health. They can also organize mass warfare and totalitarian oppression. This Lecture explores two (or three) approaches to managing state power. One approach is to control the state, directing its formidable capacities toward good uses and away from bad. Control can be accomplished politically, for example through international relations and diplomacy or domestic democracy, as well as legally, for example through international and domestic constitutional law. But where these mechanisms of control are inadequate, and the downside risks of state power seem too great, an alternative strategy is to incapacitate the state - to reduce state power, or prevent it from being built in the first place. The opposite of state-building, incapacitation (or state unbuilding) is an important strategy of constitutional design that should be put on a par with rights and political representation.
The Cutler Lecture series was established in 1927 by James Goold Cutler of Rochester, NY, to provide an annual lecture at William & Mary by "an outstanding authority on the Constitution of the United States." The original series of 16 lectures were held from 1928 to 1944. After a period of dormancy, the Cutler lectures were revived in 1980-81 under the auspices of the Law School, with each lecture published in the William and Mary Law Review.
Professor Levinson's lecture is titled "Incapacitating the State."
Description:
The modern state is an extremely powerful technology, one that can be used for good but also for evil. States can provide order and security, markets and prosperity, education and health. They can also organize mass warfare and totalitarian oppression. This Lecture explores two (or three) approaches to managing state power. One approach is to control the state, directing its formidable capacities toward good uses and away from bad. Control can be accomplished politically, for example through international relations and diplomacy or domestic democracy, as well as legally, for example through international and domestic constitutional law. But where these mechanisms of control are inadequate, and the downside risks of state power seem too great, an alternative strategy is to incapacitate the state - to reduce state power, or prevent it from being built in the first place. The opposite of state-building, incapacitation (or state unbuilding) is an important strategy of constitutional design that should be put on a par with rights and political representation.
The Cutler Lecture series was established in 1927 by James Goold Cutler of Rochester, NY, to provide an annual lecture at William & Mary by "an outstanding authority on the Constitution of the United States." The original series of 16 lectures were held from 1928 to 1944. After a period of dormancy, the Cutler lectures were revived in 1980-81 under the auspices of the Law School, with each lecture published in the William and Mary Law Review.
Contact
(757) 221-1840, [[jpwelc]]